PaperCut Blog / News

The PaperCut developers have been working hard in getting out the 11.1 release which had many enhancements and minor new features. Due to the high positive feedback about PaperCut 11’s new look and feel, we felt the urge to give a new life to our free print logging program as well.

This task, being a relatively straightforward one, was given to me (Puneet), the summer intern. I started my internship here at PaperCut Software in January 2011. It has been a pleasure working here with friendly, hardworking and enthusiastic coffee-loving developers (they weren’t able to make me start drinking coffee though!).

Over my very exciting and fulfilling two months here, I did a great amount of software testing, helped out with User Web Tool Customisation, restructured the Knowledge Base, added the header and footer to the online manual, and now, revamped the free Print Logger.

In this version…

• Most of my work went into stripping down and re-decorating the Print Logger with the New look and feel based on PaperCut 11’s new design.
• We added the News Gadget which allows you to keep up to date with the developments at PaperCut.
• The New About tab lets us share some information about PaperCut and lets you follow us close.

Print Logger is aimed at small businesses and home users. Don’t hesitate, download the new version today!

Since we release our free print logging program a few years back its been a hit with hundreds of thousands of downloads. Every now and then we receive a thank you email or a short story about how people are finding it useful. One user recently wrote to us to thank us for helping him track down why his ink was disappearing. He had no explanation as to why his home printer ran out of ink every few weeks. Print Logger to the rescue! A quick audit of print activity shows that his kids did a lot of printing before he got home from work. Now printing in his household is restricted to homework use only and he’s happy again!

There are also plenty of other examples at the big end of town. Today I received an email from PepsiCo and HP outlining their use of PaperCut Print Logger. It’s great to see that this little free program has uses ranging from small homes to the largest corporates.

For us, PaperCut Print Logger serves two purposes:

1) It’s a great test bed for our printer page analysis technology. With hundreds of thousands of users, we quickly get reports about incompatibility with new drivers. The program actively encourages users to report incompatibilities and in turn this ensures that all our applications offer the widest range of support.

2) It’s also a fantastic way to get a “taste” of our applications. Many schools for example will install PaperCut Print Logger to get a quick view of what’s going on on their networks. It’s then only a small jump to move to PaperCut to implement print control, quotas, reporting, and of course monitor the environmental impact of printing.

If you’re running print logger, please take a few moments to send us an email and share your stories.

A big thanks to Alessia and her team for their work in translating PaperCut Print Logger into Italian. Alessia and her team undertook the work as part of a software localization course at San Pio V University in Italy. It’s great to see Universities focusing some of their attention on real-world projects. Practical projects where you can “make” something are so much more satisfying. Most of my course work during my University days was theoretically based. I acquired my practical skill” outside of course while working part-time as a system administrator and of course “playing” with computers at home. The theoretical skills in computer science are important, and more importantly for Universities with aging lectures, they never go out of date (e.g. algorithms, data structures, etc.). Practical skills on the other hand need constant updating – which Web 2.0 framework do you what to learn this week!

A number of Italian universities are using PaperCut NG for their print control, and they have coordinated to translate this application into Italian. It’s now great to offer our free print logger in Italian as well. Thanks again to Alessia and team.

PaperCut Print Logger is now quite popular. The downside to the increased popularity is the increasing number of support questions. We’ve never had any official documentation for Print Logger so I thought I’d better at least write up an FAQ. I’ve taken the most common questions and put together a list here. If you haven’t tried Print Logger yet, please take some time to check it out. It’s a great way for any organization to quickly get some basic print monitoring in place.